Apparatus for transporting articles, especially rolls (reels) of packaging material, from a stock to at least one take-off station, especially to a plurality of packaging or other processing machines of a (cigarette) production and/or packaging plant.
Highly efficient cigarette factories are equipped with several mutually coordinated and interacting cigarette production and packaging machines--so-called lines. A line of this type conventionally consists of a cigarette production machine (extrusion machine), a filter-attaching machine (if appropriate) and packaging machines for the packaging of cigarette groups into packs consisting of several blanks of differing packaging material. The packaging zone of a line conventionally comprises a tin foil packaging machine, a paper packaging machine and a polypackaging machine.
The abovementioned packaging and suchlike processing machines must be supplied with material, in particular primarily packaging material, but also so-called coating paper for producing the (double) filters in the region of the filter-attaching machine. Because of the high output of these production and packaging machines, there is a constant need for a substantial amount of packaging material which is delivered to the processing machines in the form of rolls (reels). The packaging machines are equipped with reel-changing devices, on each of which an "active" running-off reel and a stock reel are provided.